


Obsession

by orphan_account



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Childhood Memories, DRAMAtical Lesbians, F/F, Implied/Referenced Abuse, Light Angst, POV Lesbian Character, Riverparents, Young Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-29
Updated: 2018-01-29
Packaged: 2019-03-11 05:00:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,110
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13517094
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Ob•ses•sion (noun): An idea or thought that continually preoccupies or intrudes on a person’s mind.“I left myself behind years ago on that trellis, and I don’t think I’m ever getting that back.”





	Obsession

She’s always trying so hard to be perfect.

I am anything but.

She’s captain of the cheer team, I’m the de facto leader of a gang. She has a perfect body, wears immaculate makeup wherever she goes; while I am fit, I get that way running from trouble, getting into fights, and I only ever wear lipstick occasionally. She has a clique of girls who are always there for her, who think she’s everything, and I have a handful of cynical, middle-aged men.

And yet...

And yet, even as she represents everything I’ve been bred to hate, even as she broadcasts herself as a plastic, cookie-cutter popular girl, she is the most attractively interesting person I have ever come into contact with. She is confident, strong, while also beautifully delicate, and that dichotomy brings me to her many times when she’s walking home.

Everyone knows me; I’m the southside girl going to a northside school. I am the very definition of “different”. But she doesn’t seem to judge me for that, despite how she acts around her peers. She’s more complex than I gave her credit for, and I learn it during those conversations en route.

We get to becoming friends, slowly but surely. I learn we have English together, and smile to think she’s noticed me there.

I call her Barbie. She calls me Scales.

She invites me over a few times. I don’t fit in at her house. Everything is cream or white or tan, the paintings clearly expensive, and every room complements the others. Although I never tell her, I think she knows I live in a trailer, and I feel small next to the concept of perfection the home represents.

I stay too long sometimes, and she has to sneak me out the bedroom window. I will never forget how to climb a trellis, and roses always remind me of her, especially if they’re white.

I only kiss her once.

*

We’re walking together in autumn of sophomore year. The leaves crunch beneath her feet, and she’s ranting about English. Her grade is low there and she hates it. The one stain on her record. I tell her I want to be a journalist; maybe I can help. She says she loves me, and she means it platonically, in place of a “thank you”, but I take it another way, entirely on purpose, and use it as an excuse to fit my lips to hers.

It’s not long, nor substantial, but tender and soft, just like she is when it comes down to it. She tastes like cinnamon, and somehow I’m not surprised, but I *am* surprised when she drops her book bag to the sidewalk and responds. Her hair is smooth like silk when my fingers rake through it, and I don’t know for sure but I think she swears in Spanish when we fall apart.

She tells me to walk her home, all the way this time, which she’s never done before, and lets herself be pressed into the first wall we come to when we get in. But her father’s here too, and his shouting is loud enough to have me running, the insults ringing harshly in my ears even though I’ve heard it all before.

We never speak of it again.

*

I never ask her, as we drift apart in the following years, why she kissed me back, why she didn’t push me off and run away. Why she didn’t tell me how her father felt about these things. I never learn if she is, or ever was, attracted to me. I don’t care. I don’t need to know.

I never ask her, when we start to actively show animosity toward one another, what changed. Why she stops talking to me on those walks. What piece of it is a lie when she says the only reason they need to stop is that her parents might see me. I never want to know. I have my suspicions, and the last thing I want is for her to confirm any of them.

I’ve seen her bruises, after all.

I go out with Hal Cooper during senior year. He’s awfully boring, entirely self-absorbed, but he’s got the money I need, the status I want, the toehold at the paper that I would have switched for my own birthright any day. We get married two years into college and I get better at pretending to love him every day, my thoughts still with her every night.

She moves to New York. I stay in Riverdale. It feels like she’s done it to rub it in my face, and I regret ever telling her that I wanted to work for the Times. It’s hard, ever so hard, to forget about her, to move on from that dreadful might-have-been and look to the future instead.

But I do it.

I remove her from my thoughts, successfully for the most part, and throw the invitation straight in the trash when her own wedding comes around to the kind of man she always told me she’d wanted. Hiram Lodge, although I remember him slightly, was never someone I cared enough to speak to in school, but right now I wish I still had the ability to throw a solid left hook.

I try to tell myself it doesn’t matter. It *shouldn’t* matter. She isn’t mine to care about. She never was.

But, regardless of that fact, I do go to the wedding anyway. I keep to the shadows, dressed in an outfit that makes me feel like I should have been the one called Barbie, and I watch her give herself away to another, digging my fingernails into my palms to keep the tears from falling. The pain grounds me, tells me why I was never good enough for her, keeps my mask of impassivity in place just long enough for me to watch them kiss. I can’t help but think he’s holding her wrong, that she’s too delicate for him, and I have to physically restrain myself, because even though it shouldn’t matter, it always, always does.

I wear a rose on my lapel for the next three years. Hal thinks it’s because he likes them, and I let him.

He thinks he knows me so well, but he’s grown to love a character. A cartoon representation of a woman; someone I would have laughed at in another lifetime. Alice Cooper is a construct, someone I’ve worked for years to learn how to be, but one thing she isn’t, is me.

I left myself behind years ago on that trellis, and I don’t think I’m ever getting that back.


End file.
